In pursuit of happiness
‘Happiness’ is a concept that I seem to be increasingly encountering. It is the subject of a piece of work that my colleagues in Arts and Society are involved with in collaboration with the Happy Museum Project, an initiative that is encouraging UK museums to support transition to well-being and sustainability in our society.
The Happy Museum Project was born from psychological research suggesting that happiness and well-being are not related to material wealth. On the contrary, an emphasis on material wealth has led to a focus on the short term, causing the majority to feel pressure to “keep up” and leading to more unhappiness. Key to a sustainable notion of well-being, according to the Happy Museum Project, is what they call ‘support learning for resilience’, which encourages learning that is curiosity driven, engaging, informal and fun and can build resilience, creativity and resourcefulness.
Of course this is not a wholly new concept. We’re becoming increasingly familiar with research that shows that over a certain comfort threshold, increased wealth doesn’t correlate with general satisfaction, take Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, for example, which was developed in the 1970s. Now the UK government has started to focus on the notion of happiness, with the announcement of the National Wellbeing Project in 2010, which will see them attempt to measure how happy Britons are and use the results to shape government policy.
One area where happiness does not seem to have been a central consideration however is in education. Take the new Ofsted framework, which requires inspectors to place emphasis on behaviour, safety and teaching but makes no mention of emotional wellbeing, sociability and support. The aim here may have been to concentrate on the essentials and perhaps the more quantifiable elements, but this only reinforces the lack of regard with which these qualities are held.
Plans for performance related pay for teachers could be taken as another example of overlooking the importance of happiness. Not only is this measure likely to increase pressure on teachers, making them less happy, but their performance is likely to be measured solely on academic results, as it must be, and not well-being. This is not to say that the two will always be unrelated. For example it seems obvious that if a child is taught in a way that is exciting, fun, collaborative and supportive then they will not only be happier but will be more engaged and therefore attain better results. But this policy risks increasing pressure on students to achieve academically, leading to more teaching to the test and so risking children’s well-being.
Additionally some proponents of performance related pay for teachers base their arguments on economics; a good teacher = a good education (good grades) = a good job = more money. Not only in the current climate is this not necessarily the case, as there are not enough good jobs for high achieving students, but if money doesn’t make us happy then we shouldn’t be thinking only about education in these terms.
So I come back to the Happy Museum Project’s central tenet – our culture must focus on the long-term and sustainable benefits of its actions. Whilst achieving good academic results may lead to happiness in the short term, it can no longer guarantee a child’s future well-being in the face of unemployment, recessions and climate change, although perhaps it can help. My point is not to belittle academic achievement, but to emphasise that like so many things, we just cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that having confidence, emotional stability and resilience, will help this generation of students to survive this uncertainty and to cope better, if not always be happy.
Developing humility by seeing my own blindness
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it” (1)
One may think that this may be a quote by a self-help guru, a Buddhist monk or a philosopher. Actually, I came across it yesterday reading Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s latest book. What he means by this is that “any aspect of life to which attention is directed will loom large in a global evaluation” (1).
Daniel Gilbert provides examples how terribly inaccurate people are guessing what will bring them happiness and what will bring misery. Apparently, winning in lottery or getting married brings much less happiness than most people are absolutely certain they will. Also, becoming paraplegic by far does not bring as much misery as we think (2).
It seems that our intuitions constantly magnify the importance of specific aspects of our lives that we are paying attention to. Attention is a bit like magnifying glass: whatever we bring our attention to seems bigger than it actually is.
It is my common experience that when I do a mistake or do not meet some sort of criteria I have set for myself, often I get a feeling suggesting that this is really bad. It feels like this will have a big negative impact on my life even in the total context of my life they are pretty minor things. However, as I continue deepening my practice of mindfulness and as I become more observant of the patterns of my mind, I start noticing things I was not noticing before. I start seeing my own blindness. I notice myself developing an intuitive feeling that tells me when I am blowing things out of proportion again. It’s like a little voice inside me going ‘here you are doing the same again’. After becoming aware of this intuitive impulse, usually I discount whatever my initial reactions of fear or frustration suggest. More often than not, this leads to being more level-headed and making better decisions.
Also, it’s a very humbling experience to see how flawed my perceptions are. This makes it into a lifelong quest of learning more and more when my perceptions can and cannot be trusted.
References
- Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, Fast & Slow, p. 402
- Gilbert, Daniel (2006). Stumbling on Happiness
What’s the best age to be?
I became 35 today, and have the cake and candles to prove it. It therefore felt particularly serendipitous to read the headline in the Guardian: Is 35 really the best age to be?
The claim is not particularly shocking, since 35 appears to offer a mixture of youth and experience. I don’t feel particularly ‘old’, but I am no longer able to call myself ‘young’ without feeling slightly self-conscious. I am not yet approaching middle age, if only because that category now seems to extend well into people’s sixties, and being ‘thirty-something’ does little to inform or inspire. I suppose I am half way to my biblical life expectancy of ‘three score year and ten’, but with fingers crossed for a cure for type-one diabetes and plenty of runs in the park, I hope to be post-biblical in my longevity.
The claim that 35 is the best age to be comes from the insurer Aviva (formerly Norwich Union). It looks like a pretext for talking about when is a good time to get insured or save, and to be honest, it does not appear to present a particularly compelling case:
“It asked more than 2,000 adults from across the age ranges what they thought the best age was to be, and the average came out as 35. While only those aged 45-54 picked that exact age, most groups chose somewhere in the 30s, except 18-24-year-olds who said 27 and those aged 65 and over who said 44.”
You don’t have to be a statistician to sense the limitations of such averaging from self-report measures, and you don’t have to have studied philosophy to wonder on what basis ‘best’ is being judged.
Moreover, previous self-report measures have also indicated that happiness throughout the lifespan is u-shaped, or as the BBC put it, smiled-shaped, and they have similar limitations, while pointing to the opposite result(!) i.e. that life in your thirties and forties is a low point in the life span. Moreover, a previous study by Relate suggests 35 is the age when your mid-life crisis has a good chance of kicking-off in earnest.
Now there’s a cheering thought…
Whatever you think of the empirical evidence(and it doesn’t impress me much) it feels like we are missing something much more fundamental. If you wait for a better life, or long for an age and lifestyle that has already passed, you are almost certain to be unhappy. It may be true that part of wellbeing consists of satisfaction about the past and hopefulness for the future, but the experience of happiness has to be savoured in the present.
The best age ‘to be’, surely, is whatever age you are now.
The Buddhist, the Benthamite and the Biographer
A year ago today(sigh) I was attending the launch of Action for Happiness! The movement has grown considerably in its first year, and I wish it well. Mark Williamson is the Director of Action for Happiness, which is affiliated to The Young Foundation, but the movement grew out of the vision and motivation of what Jules Evans aptly called The Three Wise Men.
The Buddhist:
Actually I am not sure Geoff Mulgan is really a Buddhist, at least not in the card-carrying sense, but it made a huge impression to learn that his weighty CV (now head of NESTA, but previously CEO of The Young Foundation, Director of Policy for the Blair government, author, Professor etc) is grounded(or so I like to think) by his experience of being a Buddhist monk in Sri-Lanka. I don’t know Geoff Mulgan personally, but it is hard not to be impressed by his track record.
A year ago, his idea of wellbeing seemed quite nuanced to me, and he recognised the importance of experiencing the full range of human emotion(not merely positive) for a life well-lived. I was particularly impressed by his comment that people working in government tend to dehumanise what really matters, for instance they talk of ‘social isolation’ but rarely of ‘lonliness’ and they speak of the importance of ‘social support’, but rarely of ‘friendship’ or ‘love’.
The Benthamite
I am pretty sure that Lord Layard is a Benthamite, although he may not accept the term, and has called himself a ‘democrat’, which might be a less pejorative way of saying the same thing. He has done a great deal of good to promote wellbeing, so I hesitate to express reservations, but whenever I have heard him speak, I found his idea of happiness to be a very conventional and rather uninspiring form of utilitarianism. This is too big a question to explore here, now, but I think enduring wellbeing is much more complex than mere hedonic satisfaction in its various guises.
And I would say he is Benthamite rather than merely utilitarian(his world view is radically different from, say, Peter Singer, who describes himself as a preference utilitarian) if only because in answer to a question posed by Jules Evans at the RSA event Happiness: New Lessons he made it clear that he doesn’t distinguish, as John Stuart Mill famously did, between higher and lower pleasures e.g. the pleasure of writing a poem is no greater than the pleasure of smoking a fag. For Layard, as long as you are not harming others, it really is just a question of ‘whatever makes you happy’, in which happiness is a self-evident experience, captured by self-report measures. It is hard not to respect such an eminent figure, who does so much for the social good, but I don’t find his vision of happiness rings true for me- somehow there is a lack of depth, and no ‘shadow’.
The Biographer
Anthony Seldon is Headmaster of Wellington College, and also a biographer of John Major and Tony Blair (an old friend of mine, Daniel Collings, played a significant role in producing some of this work). He is clearly hugely industrious, but I find he makes me uncomfortable, perhaps because he always seems rather sure of himself. When I heard him speak at last year’s event, I felt he sounded more like a headmaster than a biographer- his pitch was more about telling and admonishing and less about discovering or revealing. At the time I even had the unworthy thought: “You can take the happiness out of the headmaster, but you can’t take the headmaster out of the happiness” and I think that line would sound more positive with respect to being a biographer.
His idea of happiness appears richer than Layard’s, and more spiritually grounded, but still sounds too much to me like an idea that can be encapsulated in the right kind of information and directly taught, rather than something multi-faceted grounded in a range or experiences, relationships and balances. That said, he has been a trailblazer for wellbeing in schools, and walks the talk in his own school, so on balance I am sure his contribution is a very positive one.
Despite some minor reservations about the founders, I am glad to see that the Action for Happiness movement is alive and well. I hope this is the first of many genuinely happy birthdays.
Wellbeing without art
Wellbeing has become a hot political issue. Now it’s going to be measured, so that the nation’s wellbeing can be tracked along with more traditional economic measures of how society is doing. The Office for National Statistics is in charge of working out how best to measure it, which is no mean feat.
A set of proposed domains has been put together by the ONS and as part of a consultation exercise we all have the opportunity to respond. Yesterday, I received two emails from former colleagues who are heavily involved in arts for wellbeing, drawing attention to the fact that the proposed domains make no mention of the arts or creativity. This is clearly a huge oversight, and leaves me slightly tempted to make dreadfully judgemental assumptions about the worldview of statisticians, but that would be short-sighted of me.
Personally, I’ve always known, in an intuitive, guttural way, that the arts matter. Art is the most important vehicle we have as a society to understand ourselves, our relationships with others and our place in the world. Moments of celebration, bewilderment or desperation often only really make sense and come to take on their full meaning because we can connect to an artistic expression of what’s happening in our lives. Art brings things to the surface that nothing else can, whether it’s being moved to tears by a perfectly played piano, feeling the real meaning of war by looking at a painting, or laughing with liberated abandon when we recognise our own foibles in another’s artistic utterance.
Certainly, art helps us through. But that’s not to say it’s just a luxury. In my view it is a necessity. We need art in order to pose questions and propose solutions to them, to challenge, protest and defend. At the peak of an impassioned chat about what’s wrong with the world, a good friend of mine once said to me that ‘the true test of everything is the arts’. In these times of multiple crises, we need the arts more than ever, to help us understand problems and come up with solutions. It’s not just about wellbeing, it’s about survival.
So, of course arts and creativity should be included in the ONS wellbeing domains. But, even assuming enough people say so in the consultation, we need to be clear that these new measures are only ever going to be capable of sketching the vaguest picture of where we are on the wellbeing spectrum.
I quite frequently get my knickers in a twist about the inherent problems of measuring things. If you ask people questions, they answer them, but there are lots of reasons why the answers often don’t really mean much: desirability bias (saying what you think you should say rather than what you really think), suggestivity (ask someone if something is dangerous and you’ve planted the seed that it might be) and reductiveness (with complex things like attitudes, or wellbeing, the answer is often ‘it depends’, which can’t be captured by the bipolar response scales favoured by statisticians).
One of the huge challenges facing the arts is the obsession our society has recently developed with having an evidence base for everything. You can only fund your interactive art workshop for, say, young people in care, if you can prove that it ‘works’, according to one arbitrarily defined ‘outcome measure’ or another. I passionately believe that we should take steps to ensure that the things we do with and for people are effective ways of doing what we’re trying to do, and in that sense I am a firm believer in evidence based practice. But, what constitutes good evidence is a crucial political question. In the case of what ‘counts’ as an indicator of wellbeing, the exclusion of the arts is one example of the injurious ways in which we can easily get it wrong.
What if public policy can never make us happier?
At the RSA we speak about ‘policy’ quite a lot, and one of the ways we judge our success is the extent to which we think we might be influencing it. Policy matters because of scale. You can write insightful reports until the bulls come home, engage with the public until they are fed up with you, and convince yourself that your innovative work may transform the lives of institutions or individuals, but unless policy makers take note of what you are doing, the reach of your impact will probably be limited.
For instance, we would all like to think that we have a part to play in making people happier. As an individual it is better if you smile, give compliments, be warm and friendly, and gift your time and services, and perhaps you will thereby add some cheer to the world. But those effects will fade, and unless you are blessed with an unusually cheerful disposition, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep it up. It’s not that what you do doesn’t matter, but if it’s only you who is doing it, you are unlikely to change the world.
Some say that’s small minded, and that social diffusion means that we influence each other at three degrees i.e. how we behave influences our friend’s, friend’s friend. Some say that we therefore never know where our influence ends. That sounds true to me, but in the sense that we really don’t know where our influence ends, not that our influence is necessarily boundless and beneficent. It’s not just that the evidence on the three degree claim is contentious, but as any social network researcher will tell you, it’s extremely hard to track with conviction. There are just too many ‘confounding variables’, God bless them.
I still think we should be as positive as we can without being dishonest to ourselves or others, but without policy, some argue, attempts to make the world happier feel somewhat futile.
Or maybe this is completely wrong-headed, and policy is not the solution at all. Perhaps there is just no solution at that sort of scale. When it comes to improving wellbeing, perhaps policy levers and national measurements are the wrong tools for the right job.
Jules Evans continues his stellar service to the debate on the politics of wellbeing with two recent posts on this matter. The first is that if you begin a series of wellbeing questions by asking about the Government, people are not happy- the very thought of politicians gives them a jaundiced view of their own wellbeing. Secondly, there is virtually no evidence between government policy and subjective wellbeing. It’s not just the well trodden-turf called the easterlin paradox but more tangible paradoxes, like the fact that China has had about 10% growth every year for the last decades, but happiness levels are flat. I like the way Jules highlights the importance of this point in a blog called: Why are national happiness levels always so flat?
“What do happiness economists expect? Do they think that, if governments pursue the right policies, the public will go from a seven, to an eight, until eventually, after say 30 years, we will all be shouting ‘Ten!’ before ascending in rapture unto heaven? Of course, given such a bounded numerical scale, people are going to say ‘about a seven’, even if their lives have actually got better or worse over time. We forget the bad times, and we also forget the good times. Our daily well-being is probably protected by our forgetfulness and our ability to adapt.”
Are we always going to be ‘oh about seven’? What is going here? I think it’s great that Governments are thinking and talking about wellbeing, but is it conceivable that there is little they can do to influence it?
Action for Happiness!
I just came back from the launch of a new positive social movement (it’s not every day you can say that.)
People were queuing outside to get in, and the launch has been so successful that the website of Action for Happiness have been overwhelmed by the traffic (which is why I am not linking to it).
Rather than give a detailed and worthy account of what it’s all about, I thought I would give a kind of phenomenological pastiche instead:
I saw that Geoff Mulgan(Young Foundation) Lord Layard(LSE) and Anthony Seldon(Wellington College) were involved and I expected a seminar.
…instead I walked into a massive hall with a huge screen and lots of stalls of people who, if not quite selling happiness, were certainly promoting it in various ways. I was too late for the sandwiches but I grabbed an apple and tried to eat it discretely, while feeling a bit guilty not to be networking.
The talks began, hosted by the BBC’s Sian Williams. She did a good job, but I couldn’t help but think that BBC presenters are still a bit monolithic. I hope this can be viewed as a compliment, but if I had heard her speak on stage and had been asked to guess what she did I would have said: BBC broadcaster.
Andy Puddincombe from Headspace led a five minute meditation. In a hall of at least two hundred people, I was on the front row of the upper deck, overlooking the hall. One minute into the meditation, the phone of the retired church going lady sitting next to me went off, and although she looked embarrassed, it appeared she didn’t know how to turn it off, and just waited for it to ring out…meanwhile I was asked to concentrate on my in-breath and notice the sensations in my body….While doing so I honestly felt a degree of compassion for my neighbour, and almost touched her shoulder and said: “It’s ok”, but decided discretion was the better part of valour, and gave her my RSA card instead.
Lord Layard began with an amusing but perhaps over-used joke about a search engine reporting back “Your search for happiness produced no results.”…but proceeded to impress- he embodies his message of happiness, and reminds me of the grandfather in the Worthers Originals adverts.
I felt a pinch of envy on hearing Geoff Mulgan’s biography, and became even more intrigued when I learned that he trained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka.
Anthony Seldon was impassioned, and launched an excoriating attack on meaningless league tables and suggested that neither Ed Balls (ex Education secretary) or Michael Gove (current) ‘got it’ on wellbeing in education, and argued, to great amusement, that they both needed more hugs.
I was very impressed by Siobhan Freegard’s discussion of family life, especially the stat: 62% of couples with children live away from extended family, and only 60% of them compensate by actively forming new support networks-this felt very close to the home for me and I texted my wife to share the statistic. She texted back: Does more information make you unhappy?
Henry Stewart spoke on the workplace and mentioned a great survey question from Gallup: Did you do today what you are best at? Only 20% answered affirmatively. The obvious implication is that is should be higher, but that means much more proactive Human Resources, and enlightened senior management.
Gail Gallie spoke partly as an advertiser and partly as an advertising reformer-suggesting that images from adverts, sitcoms and films undermine happiness by creating impossible expectations. One of her slides quoted HG Wells saying that advertising was ‘legalised lying’.
I held a large fluffy yellow microphone and asked a question from above, which boiled down to: “How do you turn information into habits?” The point is that the action points in action for happiness: (Do things for others, connect with people, take care of your body, notice the world around, keep learning new things, have goals to look forward to, find ways to bounce back, take a positive approach, be comfortable with who you are, be part of something bigger) are presented in the form of information, and information itself doesn’t change behaviour.
Indeed information is not really the problem and almost all the action points are familiar injunctions that our better selves know only too well. As I have argued before, the key to meaningful change is to make such actions habitual.
Anthony Seldon didn’t seem to get it, thinking that spreading the information is necessary and sufficient, but I was pleased that both Mark Williamson, The Director of Action for Happiness, and Geoff Mulgan responded in a way that suggested they appreciated the centrality of the point. I wanted to reply to them, but the fluffy yellow microphone had gone elsewhere.
Liz Zeidler of the Happy Cities Initiative left a lasting impression with the comment: “We are drip fed just enough unhappiness to keep us buying stuff”, suggesting that capitalism almost depends upon misery to sustain itself…
A curious thought, and one of many I took away…as I decided to leave before the end to get back to write this blog. As I walked back to RSA I couldn’t shake the idea that all of these insights paled into insignificance compared to the simple fact that the sun was shining.
The Value of Things
As I was paying £1.20 for a sad, solitary chocolate biscuit this morning, I began wondering about how we choose to value things in society, and how all too often this valuation takes a monetary form.
There is an interesting programme going on at the NEF at the moment called ‘Valuing what Matters’. Their argument is simple: when governments set targets for themselves, they tend to measure what is easy to measure, like savings. The stuff that gets measured tends to become the stuff that matters when evaluating performance and so this cycle repeats itself.
Well, what happens when we are measuring the wrong thing? This is the argument the NEF is considering, and it applies to education too.
As students begin school again this September one thing remains constant: results matter. They are the measure universities and employers use to determine who gets in and who doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that they are only thing that matters.
As every CBI report I have ever read informs me, the UK’s top employers are worried: they need a demanding set of attributes and qualities from their graduate workers which academic qualifications cannot quantify. Since they are not being measured for, apparently whether or not an applicant has them can be up to chance.
From GCSEs to IGCSEs, the International Baccalaureate, the ‘English Baccalaureate’, BTECs, NVQs, the Cambridge Pre-U, to the new A* A Level grade and talk of scrapping AS Levels (having just introduced them) altogether, our crowded qualifications landscape is endemic of an inability to agree on what counts in education. Demos may have asked why educational assessment was ‘failing’ in 2003, but it appears the question remains just as pertinent now in 2010.
Business (and, more importantly, society) needs people who can be leaders and communicators; critical, independent thinkers, who are able to adapt and be resilient in the face of change and who are capable of applying knowledge rather than just acquiring it. These are the people who are most likely to do well at work and these are also the people who, studies tell us, are most likely to thrive in life too.
But how then do we create a school system that values and supports the development of the other qualities and capabilities people are going to need beyond school, such as an ability to stick to goals, show resilience and regulate behaviour? Or should this not be the preserve of school at all, and what then for those children who parents are unable or ill-equipped to pass these demanding qualities on to their children? Should the acquisition of such values be left to chance?
Opening Minds has been developed by the RSA partly in response to this question, and the RSA Academy’s 2010 exam results attest for how a skills based curriculum can begin to produce both well-rounded and academically sound candidates.
At Whole Education, we are beginning to ask these questions too. We don’t have all the answers are yet, but we are looking.
Happiness is an original iPhone app
The news that doctors are increasingly using their iPhones to measure their patients’ heartbeats is a great reminder of how a device can be engineered for one purpose and used in a completely different way (a disruptive innovation, to trot out the well-worn phrase). Bet Apple didn’t see iStethoscope coming.
Another great idea and well-engineered implementation is Mappiness, which asks iPhone users (about once a day) how happy they are, along with “a few basic things to control for: who you’re with, where you are, what you’re doing”. The responses and the approximate location are analysed, creating a hedonimeter that shows the average happiness for a location (London is looking a little below average at the moment).
Mappiness follows the good advice “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not” from Galileo Galilei, as does one of the strands of the RSA’s Citizen Power programme. The purpose of the Civic Health Audit, led by my colleague Ben, is to develop a tool that could be used by communities and local authorities to better measure local residents’ capability to participate in shaping the places in which they live. You can have a closer look here.
People versus process
One thing you’ll notice if you spend any time at the intersection of policy and social science is that ‘evidence based policy’ leads not only to distortions of evidence, but a focus on process rather than people. Take social workers. They have been given ever more complex form-filling processes in order to stop failures in monitoring and care. But as Madeleine Bunting said yesterday, failures will probably always occur, and anyway, the best way to stop them is not more form filling but a return to psychological astuteness and careful face-to-face interaction. The mistake is to think that because an extremely devious abuser can fool a social worker, we should retreat from fallible human contact to infallible process. This is a mistake because process is infallible as process, but is far more fallible as effective monitoring and care than old-fashioned face-to-face interaction.
With social workers the drive to process is created by a desire for infallibility. But there is a general drive to process across many professions and organisations (including, I have to say, the RSA) which comes out of the principles of social science. If some positive change is down to enthusiastic workers, a good leader, and an ethos of excellence this would be disregarded by social scientists as possessing no ‘external validity’ – that is, no validity outside the idiosyncracies of the lucky hotspot of comity and productivity. So the focus always shifts to process – what generalisable set of manipulations of variables and factors can we pick out and thus roll out more widely.
I am beginning to think that this is a wrong-headed and even pernicious mindset. Precisely what are needed to make positive changes in practices and organisations are what social science can’t measure: great people, in a happy and productive environment with an elusive ethos of excellence. These are what make most things work well.
This would have been obvious to an old-fashioned ‘paternalistic’ firm, or a medievel guild. But in the modern world, especially at the intersection of policy and social science, it is anathema. The story we tell about what makes things work is a story driven by an ever expanding army of consultants and technocrats. Yet the story is a falsehood we would do well to run out of town.
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